How many people exist today that fully understand the Bitcoin protocol?

[MicroGuy]

Sometimes when I read comments from various industry "experts" it makes me wonder how many people in the world truly understand the bitcoin protocol on an intimate level.

I mean fully know it inside and out. What do you think?

[1715502895]

1715502895

[1715502895]

1715502895

[1715502895]

1715502895

[MadGamer]

I will take my chances and say that are more then 5000 knows how bitcoin actually works If we take in consideration that bitcoin have millions of users at this moment.
I don't think you need to a high level programmer to understand how It actually works though , anyone can start reading the whitepaper and continue from there .

[4Y078]

fist of all you will need to be good at math and know how cryptography works and than you have to learn programming so that you can put your work into action in order to achieve intimate level

Hope this helps

[loserkids]

There are many people that know how it works on the surface but given the amount of devs, I doubt there are more than 1-2k people that really know ins and outs of the protocol.

[Coin-Keeper]

The word "fully" in your question is subject to interpretation.  Maybe a couple of thousand, and likely less.  I understand a bunch but I don't fully know the protocol.  An interesting question to know an accurate answer to would be:  How many folks "think" they know it well vs how many actually do?  I confess I am neither of these.  I learn quite a bit every year and I am having fun and making profits.  I am happy with that for now.

[st0nefish]

Sometimes when I read comments from various industry "experts" it makes me wonder how many people in the world truly understand the bitcoin protocol on an intimate level.

I mean fully know it inside and out. What do you think?

I think you should increase your questionnaire intervals a little more. I think it's between 7000 and 8000. Even the people working in IT sector do not know exactly. There are those who do not even hear the name bitcoin from those who have professional software development. A high level of technical knowledge is required to understand the protocol in real terms.

[morantis]

i know more than the average user, but no where near the full monty.  in fact i was just asking in another thread about a soft fork altering the new address generating hash and whether that would invalidate the old addresses in the old format.

i ask a lot of questions and answer even more questions, but the best way that i learn is to simply pick at the code.  i am going to do that now and find that block of code that concerns address formatting.  i am near the end of a project where the bitcoin core code flow analysis will be put online.  rather than simply reading plain text code, the pages will allow a viewer to click on flow lines and follow them, follow and locate variable and method/function declarations and more.

the first version will be limited to following code within that same page and once those are online, we will work on routes between pages

[achow101]

It all depends on how you define "fully". If by fully you mean understanding how everything works together and all of the small details and minutiae like everything byte-by-byte, then I would say very few people know, probably in the tens, if not single digits. However if you are talking about one step above that where people understand how everything works, how everything fits together, but not the exact minutiae of all of the bytes and such, then probably in the hundreds, at most 500. Those people is really limited to those involved in Bitcoin development as it is extremely technical and generally requires reading code and working with the code in order to understand it all.

i ask a lot of questions and answer even more questions, but the best way that i learn is to simply pick at the code.  i am going to do that now and find that block of code that concerns address formatting.  i am near the end of a project where the bitcoin core code flow analysis will be put online.  rather than simply reading plain text code, the pages will allow a viewer to click on flow lines and follow them, follow and locate variable and method/function declarations and more.

So basically doxygen: https://dev.visucore.com/bitcoin/doxygen/ ?

[Sahyadri]

Most of the millions of bitcoin users just know how to do a bitcoin transaction with their wallet.
Most of them won't be able to make a transaction on a different wallet than the one they have been using.

There might be a few hundred thousand people who have extremely good knowledge of how bitcoin transactions work. What we call Pro level users

But I assume there are only a few hundred people who understand the complete in's and out's (100% knowledge) of the bitcoin protocol.

[morantis]

It all depends on how you define "fully". If by fully you mean understanding how everything works together and all of the small details and minutiae like everything byte-by-byte, then I would say very few people know, probably in the tens, if not single digits. However if you are talking about one step above that where people understand how everything works, how everything fits together, but not the exact minutiae of all of the bytes and such, then probably in the hundreds, at most 500. Those people is really limited to those involved in Bitcoin development as it is extremely technical and generally requires reading code and working with the code in order to understand it all.

i ask a lot of questions and answer even more questions, but the best way that i learn is to simply pick at the code.  i am going to do that now and find that block of code that concerns address formatting.  i am near the end of a project where the bitcoin core code flow analysis will be put online.  rather than simply reading plain text code, the pages will allow a viewer to click on flow lines and follow them, follow and locate variable and method/function declarations and more.

So basically doxygen: https://dev.visucore.com/bitcoin/doxygen/ ?

yes, but with a slightly less technical approach.  we have gotten to the point where that site is and i love it.  i want to add a sidebar that gives information pertinent to the command, line or whatever the user has picked.

like the old view that was on the bottom of microsofts c## suite in the 2004 time span.  there was always something down there explaining the specifics of the code you were currently typing.  

on visucore there are things like this

Code:

Get connection type to call object slot in GUI thread with invokeMethod.

The call will be blocking.

Returns
    If called from the GUI thread, return a Qt::DirectConnection. If called from another thread, return a Qt::BlockingQueuedConnection. 

Definition at line 387 of file guiutil.cpp.

that is pretty easy for coders to get, but i am in a phase where i really want to bridge people that know zero programming, have found bitcoin and are interested and want to learn everything

[unamis76]

Voted less than 250... I imagine it's way less than 250 people. We can start by looking at people listed for contributions on Core changelogs, and obviously not all of them made changes that require a deep knowledge about Bitcoin...

[RocketSingh]

Sometimes when I read comments from various industry "experts" it makes me wonder how many people in the world truly understand the bitcoin protocol on an intimate level.

I mean fully know it inside and out. What do you think?

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/contributors + https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/graphs/contributors = 416 + 136 - common to both

[achow101]

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/contributors + https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/graphs/contributors = 416 + 136 - common to both

Not necessarily. A lot of the Bitcoin Core contributors contributed one commit that changed only a few lines. A lot of those are just trivial documentation (comments, non-code instructions) changes, not anything particularly technical.

[target]

Sometimes when I read comments from various industry "experts" it makes me wonder how many people in the world truly understand the bitcoin protocol on an intimate level.

I mean fully know it inside and out. What do you think?

Where are a lot of people who knew bitcoin very well because the information about it is just on their website. Intimate level like they know the protocol however is the question because for all I  know those info are just for the developers of altcoins but for us traders we probably just knew those chains as ledger of all transactions and fees for miners and so on. Things are different nowadays because of the assets on the platforms though.

[equator]

90% of the bitcoin users are the only users who came to bitcoin world for earning extra income by doing various tasks but still not knowing the Bitcoin technology and how it is created. for them Bitcoin is the way of earning through doing online work. And you can take me also one of them.

[amaclin]

90% of the bitcoin users are the only users who came to bitcoin world for earning extra income...

I think the given number 90 is too low 
99.99% should be better estimation

[Wind_FURY]

As in fully understand the protocol fully? I believe only a handful. That is way less than the lowest number of people of 250 in the poll. Many people who claim to be Bitcoin and blockchain experts do not understand anything at all. Dave Tapscott, the professional book writer, is a good example of this. Do not listen to that guy. The person to listen to in Bitcoin are the people like Peter Todd or Adam Back.

[Kamuflase]

There is no valid data about this, so all the things that we say only the allegations only. It may be necessary to make a project development to be able to know all transaction bitcoin, this is very important because bitcoin should immediately in legalkan by the State.

[saqibmunir]

if you goes in numbers the people who fully understand bitcoin protocol i would say are very less in numbers may be in thousands or less then it..... it is because with the passage of time you can know about it and according to my views there are many people who start it just a few months ago or a years and more and more peoples are interested in it .......

[digaran]

So you guys really think from hundreds of millions potential programmers, coders or maybe hackers only a few could fathom the genius of bitcoin?
There are thousands of computer science and basic coding language MIT graduated with PhD, and even more people with even greater knowledge but without any academical degree, are they to be considered retards?